Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 2).djvu/292

 *way's saga tells of no such thing; it has never been so yet; Paul Flida answers me as I answered Håkon. Are there, then, upward as well as downward steps? Stands Håkon as high over me as I over Paul Flida? Has Håkon an eye for unborn thoughts, that is lacking in me? Who stood so high as Harold Hårfager in the days when every headland had its king, and he said: Now they must fall—hereafter shall there be but one? He threw the old saga to the winds, and made a new saga. [''A pause; he paces up and down lost in thought; then he stops.''] Can one man take God's calling from another, as he takes weapons and gold from his fallen foe? Can a Pretender clothe himself in a king's life-task, as he can put on the kingly mantle? The oak that is felled to be a ship's timber, can it say: Nay, I will be the mast, I will take on me the task of the fir-tree, point upwards, tall and shining, bear the golden vane at my top, spread bellying white sails to the sun-*shine, and meet the eyes of all men, from afar!—No, no, thou heavy gnarled oak-trunk, thy place is down in the keel; there shalt thou lie, and do thy work, unheard-of and unseen by those aloft in the daylight; it is thou that shalt hinder the ship from being whelmed in the storm; while the mast with the golden vane and the bellying sail shall bear it forward toward the new, toward the unknown, toward alien strands and the saga of the future! [Vehemently.] Since Håkon uttered his great king-thought, I can see no other thought in the world but that only. If I cannot take it and act it out, I see no other thought to fight for. [Brooding.] And can I not make it mine? If I cannot, whence comes my great love for Håkon's thought?